Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Moving a castle #101

Quite a number of years ago, our friend here in Melbourne moved to the northern Japanese city of Hirosaki. She still lives in northern Japan, but in a larger city that wow, has its own Shinkansen bullet train service, a high speed train service most of us can only dream of and will never see in Australia. We caught the Shinkasen as far as we could back then when we visited her in Japan in 2010 and then changed to a local train, which was still very fast. When I think about the Japanese train system, I feel quite depressed when comparing it to our own.

Anyway, getting off track (pun not intended).

For a number of years I featured photos taken from a web cam in Hirosaki Park during the cherry blossom blooming season. Hirosaki has a good display of blossom and is a popular place for many Japanese to visit. Because the city is in the north of Japan, the trees bloom later than in the south.

You can see some photos of the blooms here as I posted at the time. Note Hirosaki Castle in the last photo. This link takes you to a post about the day we visited the castle. That was two cameras ago, but I quite like the few photos.

You nor I would have ever heard of Hirosaki if not for our friend moving there, yet here the city popped up on the BBC world news service. The castle has got to go, temporarily.

I had a look at your links, the cherry blossom is pretty, but the next link had me stunned. Four hours to clean your room?? Seems really odd to me. The castle is lovely to look at and the gardens too. The art alongside the river reminds me of the St Kilda sidewalk art in Melbourne. Do they still do that? Arts and crafts etc for sale on Sundays?

River, I guess that was many rooms and they just did not want people in the hotel at all during room cleaning time, probably for security reasons. I had not experienced that before and haven't since. Yes, the Sunday Espanade market still happens. It is a little reduced and lately and a few food stalls have opened there.

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